Lowri Griffiths does the arithmetic on 1.5 million new homes, planning reform, and what it means for someone currently paying sixty percent of their income to live in a flat with a boiler that has opinions

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

The Labour Party’s 2024 general election manifesto committed to building 1.5 million homes in the next parliament, reforming the planning system, restoring housing targets that the previous government had made optional, and generally treating the housing crisis with the seriousness that its consequences — record homelessness, record rents, a generation of people in their thirties and forties who have given up on ownership and are renting privately at prices that consume half or more of their take-home pay — demand. I read the housing manifesto chapter with the mixture of genuine hope and practiced wariness that I bring to all housing policy announcements, which is the mixture of someone who has been reading housing policy announcements for fifteen years while her rent increased by approximately six percent annually and the supply of housing she could theoretically afford to buy has remained at approximately zero units within the London postal districts where she works.

The Numbers

1.5 million homes over five years is 300,000 per year, which is significantly above the 200,000 to 235,000 that have been built in England in most recent years and which would represent the highest sustained rate of housing delivery in England since the 1970s. The target is ambitious in the sense that it has not been achieved in recent decades and that achieving it requires overcoming planning system constraints that have proven highly resistant to reform. It is also arguably not ambitious enough: London alone has a housing shortfall estimated at several hundred thousand units by the Mayor’s own calculations, and the 1.5 million national target does not specify a London allocation that would address the city’s specific shortage.

The planning reform element of the housing programme — restoring mandatory housing targets for local authorities, reforming the National Planning Policy Framework to prioritise housing delivery, and addressing the grey belt land that sits within the green belt designation but is neither environmentally significant nor functionally rural — addresses some of the structural constraints that have suppressed housing delivery. These reforms are necessary. They are not sufficient: planning reform without land value reform allows the increased planning permissions to be absorbed into higher land prices rather than lower house prices, which is what has historically happened when planning constraints have been relaxed without accompanying measures to capture the planning gain.

My Specific Situation, For Context

I rent a two-bedroom flat in N8 — Crouch End, for those not on postal code terms with North London — for £2,100 per month. This is, for Crouch End, slightly below market rate, because I have been here for six years and my landlord is not the most aggressive in the neighbourhood, which is a quality I value in a landlord roughly as much as I value a landlord who fixes things promptly, which mine also does, which makes me among the more fortunate private renters in London even as I spend 58 percent of my net income on a two-bedroom flat that I could not afford to buy because it is worth approximately £780,000 and I have approximately zero pounds in savings after the monthly expenditure of living in it.

The housing crisis is, for me, not a policy abstraction. It is a specific arithmetic that I have run approximately four hundred times in the past decade in various forms — what deposit would I need, what income, what if two people, what if I moved further out, what if I moved out of London entirely — that always arrives at the same conclusion, which is that the market has priced me and people like me out of ownership in the city where I work and where my community is, and that the rental market in which I am stuck is consuming an amount of my income that would strike most financial advisers as unsustainable and that I have no realistic mechanism to change. Labour’s housing programme, if it delivers on its targets, will take years to affect rent levels in North London because supply increases of that scale take years to build and more years to affect market prices. I hope it delivers. I am also going to need somewhere to live in the meantime. The boiler, which has opinions about cold mornings, is not encouraging about the timeline.

The political dimension of the housing crisis deserves more directness than policy discussions usually provide. The people who benefit from high house prices — existing owners, property investors, commercial landlords — are not a random cross-section of the population. They are disproportionately older, disproportionately wealthy, and disproportionately represented in the political processes that determine planning policy, housing targets, and the regulatory environment for landlords. The people who suffer from high house prices — renters, aspiring owners, people priced out of London entirely — are disproportionately younger, less wealthy, and less politically organised. This distributional alignment between housing policy outcomes and political representation is not a conspiracy. It is the natural result of a democratic system in which the people most affected by a policy outcome have less political power than the people who benefit from its continuation. Labour’s housing programme, whatever its merits as policy, is swimming against a political current that has protected housing asset values for decades and that has powerful, organised, and well-resourced constituencies in its favour. Whether the political will to sustain the programme against that current exists — through multiple Budgets, through the local planning battles where housing targets are contested, through the inevitable media coverage when a specific planning decision affects a specific constituency — is the question that determines whether the manifesto commitment produces actual homes or remains an aspiration dressed in policy language. I genuinely do not know the answer. The boiler has no opinion on this and is therefore ahead of me on the question of useful commentary.

Lowri Griffiths writes from North London for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/lowri-griffiths.

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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/labour-housing-promise-my-actual-rent-north-london-reality-check-lowri/